I agree. "I, Robot" wasn't a movie of a book, it was a movie of a *concept* (that had also been explored in a book). The movie, judged either on its own merits or merely as an exploration of Asimov's three laws, is good. It doesn't cover as many scenarios of human-robot interaction as the book does, but the part that it does cover goes pretty well.

Treason has an extremely specific definition in the USA. It what way does what he did qualify as such? Cite specific a specific example if you don't want to be dismissed as a brainless idiot proudly parroting your tribal allegiance.

Out of curiosity, how much less do you think he should have done? What secrets should he have kept from the citizens of the US and its (nominal) allies?

Sigh. You really don't get economics at *all*, do you? (Dragonslicer, talking to you too.)

The very concept of "get away with raising the price" shows an incredible lack of understanding. The optimal price is a function of supply and demand. If a company charges less than the optimal price, they will make less money off their available supply than would otherwise be the case. If the company charges more than the optimal price ("oh my $DEITY they are getting away with it!") they will price themselves out of the range of some of their potential demand, and wind up with unsold supply. Both of these options reduce revenue, but there's nothing impossible about them; they're just bad for business.

Hopefully this is reasonably understandable. Of course, things get a bit more complicated when you consider the ways in which supply and demand can be manipulated. For example, setting a high price on a luxury can actually increase demand, up to a point, and if you have a monopoly you can restrict supply to keep prices (and profits) high as well. There's also funny, semi-irrational effects like customer/brand loyalty, where some people will voluntarily give one company a monopoly on their business.

What regulation does (at the first order) is add a new cost of doing business. This cost reduces the money a company has available to obtain supply. Thus, the balance of supply and demand shifts; when supply goes does, unless demand goes down commensurately, the optimal price goes up. The company does take less profit, yes, but (assuming demand stays constant), not by the full amount that the regulation costs them; their customers also pay more.

The catch is that demand for that company's product only remains constant when the price goes up if all of their competitors are subjected to the same regulatory cost and commensurately raise their prices as well. If not - for example, if one company is subjected to a charge that all the others are not, and they compete for the same customers - then the company being regulated will lose about that much in profit. They will probably be able to recoup some of that by accepting lower supply but raising prices a little and relying on their loyal customers to keep buying that supply, but they will end up with less money.

Mind you, it should come as no surprise that regulation, when viewed from the perspective of a single established company, is pretty much always bad. View it from other perspectives, though, and it can be quite good. A company that wants to break into a monopolized market may be able to undercut the regulated competition. A potential customer who was previously not served due to being insufficiently profitable (not unprofitable, just not maximally profitable for the company) may now be able to purchase goods or services. Somebody who was completely unrelated to the company but was being harmed by an externality of its business (for example, environmental pollutants) will have their life improved.

Bandwidth is absolutely a physical thing. There is a physical hard limit on bits per second of information transmitted through any medium. There is also a significantly tighter (though growing) technological limit on our ability to transmit, route, and receive those bits in the physical transmission media we currently employ.

Saying "transmitting a lot ... data uses nothing" is ridiculous. It uses part of the limited supply of bandwidth. This bandwidth can be expanded by installing more transmission media (cable, fiber, microwave antennas, network switches, etc.) wherever the bottleneck happens to be, but that costs money too, and companies won't do it unless they expect to be able to capitalize on the increased capacity.

He never actually really says, at least in the interview transcript. He claims a technological solution exists that doesn't weaken the security otherwise, but - speaking as a information security engineer - I'm not buying it. He says what he actually *wants* is a "legal framework" to compel decryption of data. This implies that the decryption keys would have to be kept around (goodbye forward secrecy), though it doesn't actually say so. It also implies that he wants something that a subpoena can't already get, which is more than a little concerning.

Care to explain how "a legal framework for data access of entities that operate within and under a US legal construct" (aside from, you know, warrants and subpoenas and so forth) is possible for encrypted data *without* weakening the cryptosystem in a manner "antithetical to the security interests of the United States, our people, our military, our intelligence community, and anyone else who requires secure communications in any form"?

You talk a lot, but you aren't actually offering any solutions. You're just cheering for team World Gestapo. If you want anybody to take anything you say seriously, start offering solutions. The fact that crypto beats the NSA is a feature (a vital one), not a bug. If you want to argue otherwise, try coming up with the following:
1) A method / reason we should believe it won't be used to cripple our information security.
2) A reason we should believe other nations won't obtain and use the same access against us.
3) An actual problem that would be solved by going through all this rigmarole, that existing laws and government powers don't provide.
4) A reason to believe this wouldn't be abused and cause greater harm than good.

The standard of evidence I require for #4, but the way, is to make this more important than freeing the innocents held in Guantanamo Bay and punishing the uniformed abominations who tortured them.

There. I've told you what it would take to change my mind. Care to do the same?

I wouldn't say it's prohibition or puritanism that leads to deviancy, except in the sense that religion leads to heresy; you can't be deviant without having something to deviate *from*. Most fetishes are completely harmless, at least in the sense of damage to society; why stigmatize somebody just for being different? That's almost as bad as the puritanism itself, I'd say. Perhaps you mean "deviancy" in some other, more "evil" way (that is still not redundant with "perversion"), but in that case you should watch your terminology; "deviancy" is frequently used as a derogative you apply to those different from you or from your approved choices.

I'm not even sure the claim that prohibition leads to perversion is valid either. It's easy to define things which are "perverted" even while being otherwise permissive, but I'm not sure I buy the theory that people who would be, say, sexually attracted to children in today's American society are *less* likely to be so attracted in other cultures. Maybe they would, but I'd need to see evidence to believe it.

Nonetheless, you're on the right course. This notion that sex - that the mere *knowledge* of sex - is something kids need protection from is absurd and counterproductive. Forget deviants and perverts, "protecting" kids from sex leads to STDs, to teenage pregnancies, and to other harms that come from furtive and often careless experimentation instead of educated people making informed (possibly still unwise, but at least not ignorant) choices. As for the while nudity taboo, people have bodies. Under your clothes, you're completely naked. We all are. There is neither purpose nor value to keeping children from seeing bodies; all that does is give the kids a goal of seeing that which has been forbidden.

That wasn't balefire. Leaving aside the fact that we've never seen balefire in any form except originating *from* the channeler (or ter'angreal), balefire would have burned the Dragon out of the pattern, never to be reborn.

I could believe he *wanted* to use balefire - depending on how long it had been since the madness took him, it might even have worked to bring back his family - but despite the superficial resemblance (bar of searingly right light burns a hole into the earth where it hits) it just doesn't make sense for it to have been that particular weave.

I see this moronic attempt at a "joke" every time this topic comes up, but you win today's lottery in terms of getting responses, so...

Tesla makes (significant) profit on every sale. The problem is that they don't make a lot of sales. In order to make a lot of sales, they need to dramatically invest in production. Some of that goes into upgrades and retooling (making it possible to sell cheaper cars, which will get more sales), some of that goes into sheer manufacturing capacity (more factories, including their "gigafactory" for batteries).

That doesn't even count their ongoing investments in research, of course, but without those the company would never have gotten anywhere at all, and for a startup to successfully compete with the big dogs long-term, they have to leverage their first-mover research advantage ruthlessly. That might suck if you're the kind of investor that expects every week to see a higher close price than the last, but if you're *that* stupid, you've got worse problems...

Funny thing about investments in R&D: in the short term, they cost money. Of course, in the long term, they make it possible to earn a *lot* more money than they cost, but they do typically result in a few unprofitable quarters. Tesla could have just gone on selling their current lineup (or hell, their lineup from two years ago; no need to develop the dual-drive models) and been profitable - remember, they earn money on each sale - but they'd never have managed much volume. Eventually their backlog would have grown from "a few months to a year" until it reached "there's no point ordering one, it'll be obsolete by the time it arrives". Relatively shortly thereafter, that lineup of Teslas would have been obsolete on the day each one arrived, and nobody would buy them anymore.

It's not like Tesla can't afford a bad quarter. $100M is a hell of a lot cheaper than "our company is now worthless because we failed to stay relevant in this rapidly growing and advancing industry, squandering our position at the top of it". They can absorb a hit like that, even a number of hits like that.

I'll pass on that business plan.

Well, I guess that explains why you aren't a self-made multi-billionaire, doesn't it?

It really depends on the individual role, the team as a whole, and the individual being hired. I shouldn't have used numbers as people are entirely too hung up on it.

Really? Do you know how many talented developers who are completely and utterly 'dysfunctional' themselves and cause irrevocable damage to the team and its work output? It's not something I enjoy dealing with as much as helping people continue to grow and learn.

Depending on what need I'm trying to fill, I hire 90% for culture fit and 10% for technical ability. Most often, people can learn to improve their technical ability, especially b/c there is very rarely any single individual who can fill an open req 100%. That said, what I have found cannot be learned as well, is how to fit into an organization's culture.

Broad experience is great and I wholly support companies which are looking to add resources who possess such knowledge; however, broad experience can come with the price of not having enough targeted knowledge to bring deep-dive specifics to the mix.

The real question you should be asking is whether they can figure it out on their own if tasked with finding a solution to the problem. I guarantee you that most of those you have cast aside due to their lack of public-key cryptography knowledge would be able to do so while bringing you the specific knowledge you need straight out of their heads.

Honestly, if you interviewed me and I didn't know the answer to some mostly irrelevant question and told me that's why I didn't get the job, I would thank you for not hiring me to work with someone who doesn't know enough about being a hiring manager to do his job effectively.

For the space station, I'm not 100% certain why they can't delay the launch until when the station is at the same position relative to the launch site originally (approximately every 90 minutes) but it could involve things like risk of space debris in the flight path or needing the airspace clear for the initial ascent and only having it cleared for a brief time on launch day. Or it could be something else. As for why each launch window is so narrow, though, that has to do with the way a rocket launches; the orbit it has to spiral out to (yes, spiral; most of the delta-v a rocket generates on takeoff is lateral, not vertical, to get it to orbital velocity) has to coincide with the ISS being at the end of the spiral when the spaceship is at exactly the right velocity. If you miss your launch window by a few seconds, the ISS will be miles away from the end of that spiral, and you'll need to go faster to catch it, which will put you in a different orbit, so you'll need to slow down, which is hard to do in space... I don't know the exact details of how much the narrowness of the window is actually required and how much is just to give the maximum margin for error on the rocket engines and fuel supply - there's always going to be some margin, because things do go wrong and NASA rightly demands extremely high probabilities of success for ISS missions - but it's not a trivial thing to miss the launch window by 10 seconds.

For this flight, I can only guess that the situation is similar but for a slightly different reason: they need to launch at a specific time of day, so that the bonus velocity from Earth's rotation flings the rocket in the correct direction. The Earth-Sun L1 is really bloody far away - about 4x Lunar orbit, further than any SpaceX craft has ever gone before, in fact - so I'm sure they're taking advantage of every bit of thrust they can get. That means launching at exactly the optimal time, and it will only come once per day for any given location (and they can't exactly pick up the rocket and move it a quarter of the way around the world to try again six hours later). They still have some margin for error - they wouldn't be using the F9R otherwise; the telescoping legs, grid fins, and reserve fuel needed to attempt a landing reduce capacity slightly - but it can't be a whole lot. It'll take something like 100 days for the satellite to reach its intended orbital point.